The educational pendulum – a step too far?

 

S

Something is wrong in the kingdom of Denmark, educationally speaking. or so it seems to me. The attitude towards and, consequently, of educational institutions has changed 180 degrees over my life. They have gone from being a provider of God-inspired, figuratively, wisdom to an issuer of career–required, literally speaking, certificates. The teacher, once the kingpin, has become a cog in a complicated system of wheels powered by money. I understand the change and appreciate how much it has improved education but I feel it is time for the pendulum to go in the other direction.

The journey of my generation began with the teacher as God’s assistant (or maybe vice versa). Teachers decided what we needed to learn, which was accepted without question by both students, their parents and administrators. The system created a dogma, often unjustified, that educators somehow knew what we, the students, needed to understand in order to be successful in life. Questioning was taboo, as I discovered as late as 2000 when I did my MBA at a British university. During my college years, in the 1970’s, at some universities, such as UCSC where I studied, it was possible to talk with teachers on a friendly basis and even disagree about interpretation. However, nobody, including the college administration, openly disputed the teacher’s basis for assessment and the right to fail those that did not meet their criteria.

Today, in many if not most institutes of higher education worldwide, students are the customers, i.e., the college needs their tuition to survive. As high school testing standards have deteriorated over the decades, the gap between the assumed and actual knowledge of students beginning their degree programs has widened significantly. This discrepancy, combined with the ever-increasing tuition fees, has created a serious financial dilemma for college administrators: colleges need paying students in order to be able to keep their doors open. At the same time, the academization of professional life has made attaining the appropriate certificates essential for attaining most jobs, e.g., BAs for nurses. Finally, fundamental faith in the system, the belief that the people up there know what they are doing, has dropped to critical levels, also often justifiably. These crises together have created an atmosphere where an unspoken agreement exists in which students, their parents, administrators and even many teachers believe that an institution, when faced with a conflict between a student’s lack of knowledge and need for the certificate, should opt to issue the latter. Colleges and universities have become, to one degree or another, factories for diplomas, not actual knowledge. Interestingly enough, most people recognize and accept this phenomenon.

I, as a “dinosaur” who will retire from institutional college teaching in Israel in three semesters, find it disturbing that too many first-year Israeli engineering students I teach can pass my English course without knowing how to write a proper sentence in English or even in their native tongue, let alone a paragraph, not to mention create an organized argument. For me, effective communication is an essential skill. The world does not care if English is the second or even third language. As I tell my students, if a customer asks whether or not a bridge will bear a given weight, you need to be able to produce a coherent answer. My college, to be fair, is slightly more insistent on keeping testing standards up than many others. However, the unspoken and spoken message is that it is not “good for the college or department” if too many students fail. Teachers, beware.

At the same time, students should be made aware that they will be shortly entering the world of real work without many of the tools they need to be effective and that this lack will impact their own professional lives, not to mention those affected by the results of their work. It is clear that the omniscient and omnipotent status of teachers not so long ago was unjustified and harmful. On the other hand, the perception of a teacher as a clerk functioning as a cog in the system is equally unjustified and harmful. It is time to find a reasonable medium between these two extremes. The pendulum needs to start swinging in the other direction.

West and [Middle] East – Academic meeting

Although it was quite a few years ago, I still remember my feelings as an 18-year-old freshman at UC Santa Cruz on the first day of college, physically registering for classes (pre-Internet days). I felt fear and great uncertainty as I circulated among my fellow new students, all mostly entirely white and 18 years old and having just completed high school.  Our accumulated non-academic life experience and self-confidence was rather close to absolute zero even if we tried to hide this lack. In terms of religion, most were Christian with a small sprinkling of Jews and Muslims.  The largest minorities were Afro-Americans (to use the current term) and Asians, whose cultural norms were not that different from the other students. In other words, our lecturers looked on a rather homogenous group of students in terms of age and cultural background.

I have been teaching English at the Braude College of Engineering in Karmiel in the Galilee in Israel, for over 25 years now. The college, currently with some 5,500 students enrolled in its various programs, is a second-tier engineering college, behind the Technion, which is the MIT or Cal Tech of Israel, and offers first and second degrees in various disciplines, including mechanical and electronic engineering as well as biotechnology, programming and industrial management. The contrast with my undergraduate experience as I observe and communicate with my students is quite striking in all aspects.

First of all, the ages of my students range from 18 to 28. The youngest are Arabs from the surrounding villages, who are not required to serve in the army or do national service and, in many cases, are encouraged to get a degree before starting to work. The oldest are those that served in the army, often both the mandatory period and sometimes an additional period as “regular army, often followed by a trip to a distant land to clean their heads and preparatory studies of a year or more to improve their grades to be accepted at the college. Moreover, most have had significant life experiences, including combat service, officer training, setting up businesses and enriching trips abroad. They are far from innocent and, in many ways, much more knowledgeable than me.

In terms of religion, since the college is in the Galilee, students may be Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Catholic, Greek orthodox, Russian Orthodox or none of the above, as in the case of many Russians and their children. This means that the holiday calendar, as reflected by dates on which quizzes may not be given, is rather complicated.  Of course, during Ramadan, which lasts a month, many of my students have a hard time concentrating, especially if the holiday falls during hot weather, since many of the Muslim students neither eat nor drink during the day.

Beyond that, the behavior norms of Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, are quite different from the Jews. While latter tend to be direct and clear in expressing their understanding, agreement or lack thereof, Arab mentality, especially among the female students, is much more understated. They tend to avoid expressing their true state of comprehension or unhappiness. The true situation is often only discovered during testing as reflected by the actual results.

Given the age of most of the students and their understandable desire to gain economic independence, they are very directed in their studies.  Engineering studies are quite demanding and difficult, often involving more than 20-30 hours a week just of class time, not to mention homework. Since their goal is clear, most of my students accept the heavy burden of study in good cheer.

This heterogeneity has a strong effect on the whole style of teaching. Israeli college lecturers can be subject experts and even mentors but not parental figures. To be effective, it is necessary to be sensitive and flexible in approaching students. Some need direct challenges and questions while others have to be handled more indirectly in a more non-threatening manner. In terms of authority, given the self-confidence and experience of the students, teachers must show respect but clearly exercise authority to maintain “possession” of the class. Otherwise, they simply lose the students, who do not hesitate to complain about any improper aspect to the course coordinator or department head. By the nature of group dynamics, this fine line between authority and respect differs for each group of students, often depending on the ethnic mix of students. Thus, Israeli college lecturers, to an even larger degree than for most teachers in the country, not only have to be experts in their subject matter but also strong personalities to successfully lead a class.

Kipling wrote that East and West will never meet. It is clear that college teaching in this nook of the Middle East and in the United States, I imagine even today, are extremely different despite the similarities in the subject matter taught. I can say that, after many years of teaching, the aspect I most enjoy of this profession is my interaction with my students, who not only give me hope for the future but also personally enrich me with their insights and understanding.

Triangular imbalance

The players in higher education include three groups: students, administration and teachers. The power held by each group is based on tradition but is also dynamic. In Israel and, I suspect, other countries as well, a major shift has occurred in these power politics. Specifically, Israeli college students, through the student unions, have begun to actively apply their financial and numerical power to change academics.

In traditional universities worldwide, the professors once ruled the roost. Students had little if no say in their own education. It is said that the disturbances of 1968 in France were said to have ignited by the simple gaul, pun intended, of a Sorbonne student, who dared to pose a question to a professor. I experienced this attitude more recently, in 2002, when I innocently challenged the grade given by the learned professors at Leicester University on my MBA thesis.  They did not apparently recognize my right to have a grade justified.  Of course, the administration has almost always supported the staff in any dispute, viewing the teachers as the foundation stone of the institute's reputation.

However, the nature of academics as well as society has radically changed. More and more institutitions of higher education have opened in all countries, whatever their denomination, to meet the growing demand for degrees if not actual education. At the same time, public funding of higher education has failed to keep up or even declined. Thus, most colleges find themselves seeking funds.  The voiceless students have now become the client, the actual term applied by the administration. In other words, without proper student enrollment, the learned professors will have no position. Thus, in Israel today, students have an ever increasing vote in curriculum matters.

An example of this trend is the current controversy regarding the teaching of English in Israeli universities.  Hebrew being a limited in its international use, English is universally understood as the key for success.  However, the question of who is going to pay for the English courses has always been a sticky issue. It has been standard practice to require students to pay extra for lower level English courses since they are supposedly remedial and only for those freshmen whose English is not up to par. The sheer number of students taking such remedial courses suggests a serious gap between the required level and actual level.  Enter politics, in the person of a populist Minister of Education. One way to gain favor is to make life easier and less expensive for young voters. Six months ago, he arranged a way that the students could take a free and unaudited English course on line but would have to take the English test for that course level at the university where they study.  This option clearly helps saves the students money and time.  However, based on the results of the tests at Israeli institutes of higher learning, after the first such semester, it doesn't seem very effective in teaching English, even if the goal is strictly limited to reading comprehension.  Nationwide, around 50% of the Israeli students that took the online course failed their college English tests. Tension between students and staff has increased, needless to say.

Clearly, a balanced relationship is needed. Students have rights, including the right to 

education that opens horizons and serves them in their lives. They also have the right to be taught by lecturers that know to teach and to be graded fairly.  On the other hand, lecturers are not mere servants that satisfy basic students' immediate desires, those being high grades with minimum work. They have attained some perspective on longer term needs.  As a current lecturer and a former student, I believe in balance and mutual respect in student-teacher relations. My experience is that most students and lecturers are reasonable people and share a vision. To mangle Lincoln's phrase from the Gettysburg Address, education so divided cannot long survive.